The Joy Luck Club

This extraordinary film about four Chinese American women and their immigrant mothers opens when one, June, is invited to join the mahjong club of her “aunties” following her mother’s death. Accepting means more than tickling the tiles; it means assuming the burden of her mother’s story. In filming Amy Tan’s best-selling novel, Wang beautifully captured the book’s intimate sense of history as reverie. Particularly for the second-generation immigrant, history is a mystery located in the family story—not the one told but the ones untold. Listen hard to the sighs of your mothers, look long into the eyes of your aunties, and incredible tales will unfold to explain the fictions of your own life.